[11/2/10 : I have since removed the posts referenced in the first paragraph.] 

                        ply over ply:

                        the words have become my

                        mantra – pound’s words

                        for the water at the knees

                        of the goddess, emerging –

                        but I got it as his practice

                        of poetry, as well

            I have the temptation to remove some of the recent posts: their prosaic declarative, of course, is at the essence of their music. And, for those of us not yet perfected, unlike Emily, publication not only alters the subjective view, it changes the objective conditions.

            The teacher, of course, was a poet – something I failed to recognize, until he was gone. I have had at least four initiatory teachers. And not sensing true completion in myself (in spite of the realizational eye of the abyss), I assume that I am waiting. But the reason all but one stood outside, is because of the one. The one who now writes only needed to turn around. The others were all gifts for the poet; but a poet was the teacher.

            Say: I am the poet.

            Say: all of this was only for the poetry.

            Not altogether true, for while the prose not only closed the false history and opened the true, it involved, finally, a concessionary voice to the Great Objective Critic. But, I suppose such was inevitable.

            So the map extends. Or, rather, the map begins to take inner form in terms of the world, and not just the subjectivity of awareness, reflection, perception and thought.

            Just as all of this was for the poetry, the map was always in seed in the Tarot. [I like the Italianate rather than the French: that is, I prefer the hard final ‘t’.] I have been working the Cards (more or less strictly for myself alone) – or perhaps the Cards have been working me – for the last thirty years.

            Without the Cards – that is, before I involved the Cards in the process – I had gotten to the moment as reflection, the Eye of the Great Body, but I remained caught up in the cyclical toils of the One, the obsessive / compulsive western cognitive addiction. The Minor Arcana, as they unfolded themselves for me as the philosophy of reflection, gave the formal, if paradoxical description of the reflective process – a description that carried me out of the cyclical maelstrom.

            When I began working the Cards, a madman of my acquaintance, Joe S., in a street stoop conversation, pointed to the nature of the Fool as the empty set of Seven. A true manic-depressive, he was in the high side, spewing his repertoire of cosmological psychedelia, his universal interpretation of both religion and the occult as the work of the ‘faeries’, the plant powers. But he had done some reasonable homework

            What I had already determined was that the Tarot was a self-explanatory text.

            If I have had difficulty in determining what to do with the ‘rational’ prose, it is because the rational prose depended on the ‘irrational’ prose that defined the Tarot, first of all, in terms of the metaphysics of reflective awareness.

            I put on my reasonable student hat – my ‘good student’, who honors father and mother – and I have one or two texts that do not put me over the line with my mad friends.

            And then I put on the poet hat, and it makes no difference.

            The map of the world is the Tarot. The journey is Perceval’s journey.